Apr 17
Candidate Talk - Why do Giraffes Have Spots? The Life, Discourse, and Patterns in 1930s Japan
Join the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures to listen to a talk by a Candidate for the Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese position, titled Why do Giraffes Have Spots? The Life, Discourse, and Patterns in 1930s Japan.
This talk examines a 1933 debate regarding the formation of giraffe’s spots between physicists and biologists. It will juxtapose this debate with Kuki Shūzō’s The Structure of Iki, a philosophical treatise on Japanese fashion and culture published in the early 1930s, and demonstrate how the philosopher's and the physicist's ideas of vital patterns mutually elucidate each other. It will then use designs of the 1930s, including architecture, textiles, and advertisements, to illustrate the relation between life and pattern, uncovering the political force in these patterns of the interwar period.